Quotes by Marc Levinson

“Those who had no wish to go international, who sought only to serve their local clientele, learned that they had no choice. Like it or not, they were competing globally because the global market was coming to them.”

“By far the biggest expense in this process was shifting the cargo from land transport to ship at the port of departure and moving it back to truck or train at the other end of the ocean voyage.”

“His big insight was that the customer doesnt care how youre shipping the goods. The customer wants to get it from here to there cheap and on time. The customer doesnt care if it goes by air or land or sea.”

“A lot of the policy discussion seems to assume that once this bill is passed, some of the undocumented aliens will simply leave the country and others will stop coming.”

“Before the container, transporting goods was expensive. So expensive that it did not pay to ship many things halfway across the country, much less halfway across the world.”

“I think this has been a big deal for Houston. It really helped make the port there a major league port.”

Competition is often conflated with capitalism, but they are not at all the same. Capitalism involves private ownership of the means of production and distribution, but the word implies nothing about the way in which privately owned firms do business. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with a society in which a powerful state doles out favors to private monopolies, protects some enterprises from others, or even sets the prices privately owned firms may charge for their products. Indeed, while capitalists tend to praise the virtues of competition, many of them would just as soon avoid it.